Dr. Vasudeva Varma is a Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), currently serving as the Head of Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) and the Head of Information Retrieval and Extraction Lab (iREL). His research interests are in the broad areas of Information Retrieval, Extraction & Access, more specifically ~ Social Media Analysis, Summarization, Semantic Search, Text Generation, and Cloud Computing.

He has previously served as CEO of IIIT Hyderabad Foundation, which runs one of the largest technology incubators in India, and the Dean (Research & Development), IIIT-H.

Prof. Varma has over 300 publications which have been cited over 4800 times. In 2020, he received Google India’s Research Award for his works in the area of Artificial Intelligence for Social Good (AI4SG). He published a book on Software Architecture (Pearson Education) and close to two hundred technical papers in journals and conferences. In 2004, he obtained young scientist award and grant from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for his proposal on personalized search engines. In 2007, he was given Research Faculty Award by AOL Labs.

He co-founded SETU Software Systems Pvt Ltd, a technology start-up along with Dr. Prasad Pingali (Vasu’s first PhD student) which is focused on solving information access problems using unstructured data analytics.

He was visiting professor at UPV, Valencia, Spain (Summer 2007), UBO, Bretagne, France (Summer 2009) and Language Technologies Institute, CMU, Pittsburgh, USA (Summer 2010)

He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad in 1996. Prior to joining IIIT Hyderabad in 2002, he was the president of MediaCognition India Pvt. Ltd and Chief Architect at MediaCognition Inc. (Cupertino, CA). Earlier he was the director of Engineering and research at InfoDream Corporation, Santa Clara, CA. He also worked for Citicorp and Muze Inc. in New York as senior consultant.